Virtual desktops provided as part of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or desktop-as-a-service (DAAS) offerings are becoming more commonplace in today's enterprise work environments. The security of having a remotely stored desktop, ability to access the desktop from any location and on any device, centralized desktop management, efficient use of hardware resources, as well as numerous other benefits made possible by VDI/DAAS are a large benefit for many organizations.
In a conventional VDI or DAAS environment, each user in an enterprise is provisioned a virtual desktop and is allowed to access his or her virtual desktop over a remote network connection, such as a WAN connection. The virtual desktops are typically hosted on servers that reside in a data center of the enterprise (or a third-party service provider), and each host server may execute multiple virtual desktops. Users can utilize a client device to remotely log into their individual virtual desktop and all of the application execution takes place on the remote host server that is linked to the local client device over a network using a remote display protocol, such as remote desktop protocol (RDP), PC-over-IP protocol (PCoIP), VMware Blast, virtual network computing (VNC) protocol, or the like. Using the remote desktop protocol, the user can interact with applications of the virtual desktop, which are running on the remote host server, with only the display, keyboard, and mouse information communicated with the local client device. A common implementation of this approach is to host multiple desktop operating system instances on separate virtual machines deployed on a server hardware platform running a hypervisor.
In conventional virtual desktop technology, when an owner of a virtual desktop desired to collaborate on her virtual desktop with other users, for example to allow each collaborator to view the virtual desktop and to produce mouse or keyboard inputs on the desktop, some form of collaboration software would have to be installed on the virtual desktop. Some examples of such software are WebEx, available from Cisco WebEx, and GoToMeeting, available from Citrix Systems, Inc. Using such conventional collaboration software with virtual desktops often produced a less than ideal user experience since the user desiring to start or join a collaborative session needed to install additional software and launch it each time a collaborative session was initiated or joined. Such collaboration software is often expensive and did not always integrate well with virtual desktops.
More recently, there have been some advancements which allow a user to natively share their virtual desktop with others, provided that the virtual desktop supports a specific type of operating system, such as Microsoft Windows. However, these advancements still require all the users participating in the collaboration to install a virtual desktop client application on their device before the desktop could be shared and the installed virtual desktop client needs to support the same operating system. Downloading and installing a virtual desktop client typically requires that every user has an account set up to access the same virtual desktop system, which many users may not have. Moreover, if the user only wishes to join a collaboration session once or twice, the user may not wish to download and install a client application on their device or establish an account with the virtual desktop system. A more seemless and efficient approach is desirable for providing collaborative access to virtual desktops.